No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace

Jean d'America

In No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace, each page is as brief as a hurricane's eye, glimpsing the eerie territory d'Amérique's speaker traverses like an apocalyptic flâneur. His “body / a devastation inventory,” his stroll a “walk / to curse the sidewalks,” he peers into the ruins—left by the winds of colonialism, capitalism, war, and natural disaster—and sees a “crop of eyes” peering back. What others dismiss as broken, for D'Amérique, is a mirror in shards, “drinking up all the world's rot / then spilling it all out in diamantine rays.” The first of his books to appear in English, this work reclaims the visceral potency of poetry—it is food, it is “collars of blood,” it is a garment sewn with “a thread of sobs.”

Shortlisted for the 2023 PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation